What is happening here is the opposite. We have those infinitely hyped chatboxes (that, granted, can currently aimlessly chat better than me, what's impressive) that are hyped into silver bullets that can kill any monster. But all they can do is to chat, by construction.

At the same time, other AIs are constantly progressing at other, useful things, completely ignored by nearly everybody.

> But all they can do is to chat, by construction.

Perhaps, but with the ability to traverse the web and interface with applications, there might actually be a qualitative difference from chatbots of yore.

> At the same time, other AIs are constantly progressing at other, useful things, completely ignored by nearly everybody.

Interesting, such as what? Any examples?

Well, yeah, the chatbots of today are qualitatively different from the chatbots of yore. That doesn't turn them into secretaries, no matter how much they can mislead you to think they are.

> Interesting, such as what?

Factory robots, terrain traveling, object recognition, speech recognition, voice syntesis... On the symbolic side, have you looked at modern compilers and linters?

Language models should have a huge impact on search. And yes, search is a very impactful thing. But that too requires something a bit different from a chatbot. Not a complete new technology, but different applications.

What other progressions have occurred as of late that are of note ?

The motives are different this time. Those in the know are deliberately downplaying and misdirecting to stave off panic and political meddling. So far it seems to be working. The people I know who aren't following closely don't seem to realize how we may be on the brink of something very big. And these are very smart and technical people.

I do wonder if the intelligence agencies are already deeply involved. If OpenAI is working with them training no-guardrails AIs.

I also wonder if the CCP/PLA is pushing Baidu's AI efforts, or if Baidu is working on its own and trying to avoid official attention.

Yup, I have used tons of chatbots over the years and they all look like worthless toys compared to GPT4 . Saying that they are similar is like saying mobile phones are similar to old diaries.

But don't forget the near antonym ELIZA effect, helpfully linked from the same Wikipedia page. People love to project cognitive explanations onto any complex system behaviors that they observe.

I only briefly toured the AI field over 25 years ago after the prior AI winter was old news. I remember a couple epigrams heard from specialists at the time:

"AI is just advanced algorithms", which I think is a (slightly bitter, mostly pragmatic) reflection on the AI effect by people who had had to adjust their outlooks after that AI winter.

"Play syntactic games, win syntactic prizes", which I think was meant to remind one of the ever-present ELIZA effect.

My biggest worry about this current AI hype cycle is for how it will be marketed with the same kind of obfuscation the Web 2.0 and after user-driven content distribution systems. I'm afraid most consumers do not understand how much smoke and mirrors is involved in making products seem smarter and more authoritative than they actually are. How users themselves subconsciously cover real gaps in the correctness or completeness of the products and put more faith in them than is really warranted.